Apo thinks:
A system, typically a brain, is conscious iff it creates a model of it's environment it uses to make predictions. Consciousness is the action or function of doing this. — bert1
Hence, if a robot or computer program can report on inputs – with Chat GTP as one example of this - it is then as conscious as anything else.
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Apo is an eliminativist who deems all speak of first-person awareness and, hence, of consciousness to be a linguistic social construct devoid of real referent(s). — javra
You're making him sound like an idiot! — RogueAI
real? — javra
Really what? Really an idea? Really material? Really semiotic – as in the modelling that connects the two? — apokrisis
As in something that ontically occurs. — javra
I'll tentatively interpret you meaning that matter is the constitutional makeup of any given (what Aristotle intended by "matter") - and that consciousness thereby supervenes on its own constituents. — javra
Yes. But what are the ontic commitments of this term "real" that you employ. Or what has become now the term "ontic" that I guess is supposed to mean "really real" or "fundamentally real" or "monistically real". — apokrisis
I've told you I am a holist and not a reductionist and therefore don't buy the causal cop-out that is supervenience.
So your line of argument goes wrong from there. I am not a reductionist. And you don't seem to have a clue about what else that leaves. — apokrisis
I've told you I am a holist and not a reductionist and therefore don't buy the causal cop-out that is supervenience. — apokrisis
Life is an enduring mystery. Yet, science tells us that living beings are merely sophisticated structures of lifeless molecules. If this view is correct, where do the seemingly purposeful motions of cells and organisms originate? In Life's Ratchet , physicist Peter M. Hoffmann locates the answer to this age-old question at the nanoscale.Below the calm, ordered exterior of a living organism lies microscopic chaos, or what Hoffmann calls the molecular storm, specialized molecules immersed in a whirlwind of colliding water molecules. Our cells are filled with molecular machines, which, like tiny ratchets, transform random motion into ordered activity, and create the purpose that is the hallmark of life. Tiny electrical motors turn electrical voltage into motion, nanoscale factories custom-build other molecular machines, and mechanical machines twist, untwist, separate and package strands of DNA. The cell is like a city, an unfathomable, complex collection of molecular workers working together to create something greater than themselves. Life, Hoffman argues, emerges from the random motions of atoms filtered through these sophisticated structures of our evolved machinery. We are agglomerations of interacting nanoscale machines more amazing than anything in science fiction. Rather than relying on some mysterious life force to drive them, as people believed for centuries, life's ratchets harness instead the second law of thermodynamics and the disorder of the molecular storm.
Isn’t that a reductionist (i.e. bottom-up) model? — Wayfarer
Hence, is consciousness actual rather than illusory, fictional, etc.? — javra
But I'll cut the crap. — javra
The model imposes its mechanical constraints in top-down fashion so as to ratchet the biochemistry in the desired direction. — apokrisis
Desired by whom? — Wayfarer
There seems an implied agency here — Wayfarer
if molecular structures are ‘the bottom’, what is the origin of the ‘top down’ constraints. — Wayfarer
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